2015: Another banner year for Best Friends and homeless pets, with 207,000 animals directly helped

As we move forward into 2016, I am thrilled to be able to look back and share with you the successes we have achieved together in 2015. While we track our efficacy at Best Friends on an ongoing basis, looking back over the entire year in total is undoubtedly one of my favorite things to do. The growth of this movement to save the lives of pets is very apparent as we look at the total impact of our work together, especially compared to last year’s results.

As you can imagine, some of the results from the past few weeks are still coming in, so some of these numbers are for our fiscal year, which ended on September 30. As the final year numbers come in, we will update this post.

Here are just a few of the highlights:

More than 207,000 pets were directly helped across the organization.

There were more than 76,000 adoptions across all of our programs.

82,450 animals were fixed through our many spay/neuter programs across the country. If we include trap/neuter/return (TNR) surgeries, this number is nearly 133,000.

In Los Angeles, our programs are showing incredible results. There’s been an overall 56 percent reduction in shelter killing since the NKLA initiative was launched (down nearly 17% percent since the last calendar year).

The NKLA Coalition, led by Best Friends found homes for around 24,000 animals.

Utah is seeing similar results. There has been a 79% percent reduction in shelter deaths and 27 communities are now no-kill in Utah since our work began in the year 2000.

Twenty cities and one county were victorious over breed-discriminatory legislation in 2015.

Twenty new communities enacted bans that prohibit the sale of puppy mill dogs in pet stores. That brings the total to 91 communities in the U.S. and Canada. That means in those communities dogs from commercial breeding operations, or mills, cannot be sold. The number of pets impacted in total is hard to know, but it also in turn means more adoptions so the impact is very large.

More than $1.6 million was distributed in grants to No More Homeless Pets Network partner organizations.

Our nationwide dog walk and fundraising event — Strut Your Mutt — raised more than $2 million, with more than $1.4 million of that distributed directly to approximately 284 participating partner organizations.

Best Friends’ No More Homeless Pets Network partner groups total more than 1,400, and the Network in total helped more than 116,000 animals.

We took in 1,340 animals at the Sanctuary, and more than 1,400 were adopted.

Nearly 30,000 people visited the Sanctuary, with more than 8,900 people volunteering their time.

I’d like to leave you with this wonderful video that shows just a small fraction of the 76,000 pets who were adopted through Best Friends last year. Each face is a very sweet reminder of why we do what we do.